Overview

Making Room for Innovation

Is your IT organization focused on making your business more competitive, or are you caught up in the complexities of maintaining the status quo?

A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly related a concern shared by many CEOs that the competition is heating up while their own organization is "preoccupied with 'keep the lights on' IT projects."1 Without a doubt, IT must stay up and running, but it shouldn't stop there.

It's Complicated

Too often, businesses are tied to complex IT systems that have become more difficult and expensive to manage and maintain—and that can't adequately support new ideas and changing business models.

Years of a highly fragmented IT industry have given rise to highly fragmented and increasingly complex IT environments that are making it difficult for organizations to keep costs down, grow their business, and respond quickly to rapidly changing markets.

Less Complexity, More Innovation

The less complex your IT environment becomes, the more room there is for the innovation that can change the future of your organization. According to a recent paper from the Economist Intelligence Unit, 59 percent of companies value innovation generated from within—so it's important for businesses to create an environment in which innovation can thrive.2

If CEOs aren't continually asking how their organization can change the game by harnessing trends such as big data, mobile applications, and cloud computing, they're likely to get blindsided.

Using IT to Create Value

Businesses that use IT as more than just a provider of services see more innovation in their organization. By eliminating complexity and simplifying IT, you have more time and resources to create added value for your customers and for your business.

Using IT to create value-added services and consistent user experiences simply makes sense. Leading companies use IT to test new ideas, adopt successful changes, and disseminate innovations quickly and cheaply.3

OnStar, LLC had ambitious plans to launch new, in-vehicle communications services and expand into China. They soon realized they needed a more-flexible IT infrastructure and a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to grow their services portfolio quickly and enter new markets globally.

"We've added features over time, and each one of them had an application behind it," says Jeff Liedel, CIO at OnStar. "What we found is that we had coded the same functionality—the basic functionality of how to contact the vehicle, store information about the vehicle, what features were available on the vehicle—over and over again."

This is disruptive innovation—making the complicated simple, making the expensive affordable, driving growth by transforming what exists and creating what doesn't.

"The Empire Strikes Back," Technology Review, January/February 2012.

Oracle Is Simplifying IT

There's good news for business leaders struggling with too much complexity in their organization. Oracle is engineering out the complexity that stifles business innovation, and engineering in speed, reliability, security, and manageability.

The result is best-in-class products throughout an integrated stack of hardware and software, with every product and every layer designed and engineered to work together according to open industry standards. Oracle's complete, open, and integrated solutions offer extreme performance at the lowest cost, with support for the entire stack—all from a single vendor.

Oracle is changing the game and making room for innovation
by simplifying IT.

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Chapter 1

Engineered to Work Together

Gartner estimates that, in 2012, organizations spent 63 percent of their IT resources to run the business, 21 percent to grow the business, and 16 percent to transform the business.1

What if you could change that mix for your business?

Maintaining Complexity

Businesses spent almost four times as much on IT resources in 2012 to maintain the status quo as they do to enable new business models.

Organizations spend almost four times as much to maintain existing systems as they do on IT innovation. (Click each bar for more.)

Run the Business - 63%

This is an indicator of how much of the IT resource is consumed and focused on the continuing operation of the business.

Grow the Business - 21%

This is an indicator of how much of the IT resource is consumed and focused on developing and enhancing IT systems in support of business growth (typically organic growth).

Transform the Business - 16%

This is an indicator of how much of the IT resource is consumed and focused on implementing technology systems that enable the enterprise to enact new business models.

For decades, businesses have built massively customized IT infrastructures from a mixture of components and makeshift integrations. Simply being able to share data, business processes, and computing resources among systems requires a major effort—and is often unsuccessful. In the middle of this complex web of systems and processes, IT organizations must make any modifications slowly and cautiously, because even the smallest change could break everything.

Saddled with making all the pieces and parts work together, IT has to concentrate almost exclusively on maintaining business as usual, with little opportunity for innovation.

Less Complexity, More Innovation

If you could spend less of your IT budget on maintaining day-to-day operations by eliminating complexity—for example, by managing the performance, configuration, provisioning, and patching of your IT systems from a single application—then you could invest more in growing your organization's top line. That's where you want to spend your resources.

"UBank selected Oracle as its technology partner because it could provide a top-to-bottom solution that enabled us to focus on being bankers and left Oracle to focus on providing and integrating the technology."

First, determine which vendors have the best engine, brakes, wheels, transmission, steering assemblies, seats, and so on. Next, hire a mechanic to assemble your car—with no guarantee that the parts will actually work together, or that you'll ever get where you want to go.

Also, forget about taking advantage of the faster performance, advanced safety features, or other innovative capabilities that come with the complete car. These benefits aren't available when you buy the parts separately because they're engineered as part of the whole car. They're the result of years of experience spent designing, testing, and engineering integrated cars.

Simplify IT with Hardware and Software Engineered to
Work Together

From software to hardware and applications to disk, there's a synergy that starts in the engineering process. It's the understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and it's the idea behind Oracle's integrated technology stack—hardware and software engineered to work together in a way that's never been done before.

Throughout the Oracle technology stack, products have been engineered to work together—not as an afterthought or a workaround, but incorporated into the design and built into the code to provide a new kind of extreme integration that has

Integration inside each layer

Integration between layers

Integration with other systems

With this extreme integration, Oracle can deliver performance, scalability, security, business intelligence, and manageability for the entire stack.

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Complete Security for the Complete Stack

To protect against data loss, regulatory noncompliance, and damage to your brand, Oracle provides multiple layers of security to ensure that only authorized users have appropriate access to your systems. Oracle's inside-out approach to security starts with protecting the core—where your data resides—and adds more security layers out to the perimeter.

Data Encryption
Data encryption prevents direct access to sensitive information—whether it's on the network, at rest in the database, in transit from the database, or in a back-up file. Oracle helps you safeguard personal and confidential information stored in Oracle Database, even when a user has bypassed other controls. The built-in cryptographic acceleration in Oracle's SPARC servers allow these encryption and decryption operations to be processed quickly, without sacrificing application performance.

Access Control
With access controls, you can allow the right people in (with a manageable process) while keeping the wrong people out. Oracle Identity Management lets you set access controls based on roles, entitlements, rules, and other factors to secure applications and data. For added protection, Oracle Database prevents privileged users from accessing application data within the database. Risk-based authentication and strong authentication methods provide assurance of a user's identity for both on-premises and public cloud environments. And Oracle prevents co-mingling of data in virtualized operating system environments by providing separate security domains for each application.

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Auditing and Monitoring
Oracle adds another layer of security to your database and applications with the ability to detect and prevent configuration changes. You can continuously monitor different activities—including business transactions, database traffic, and database audit trails—to identify suspicious behavior and block threats before they reach your data.

Performance and Scalability Using Clustering and Virtualization

By using clustering and virtualization technologies to add storage, network, and computing capacity at all levels of the stack, Oracle can deliver the highest levels of performance and scalability for your virtualized or cloud environment.

Instead of managing applications that are tied to specific server, storage, or network components, you can pool hardware and software into shared resources, and make a single physical resource look like many resources (virtualization) or many physical resources look like a single resource (clustering). As your data center workloads fluctuate, having a centralized pool of IT resources lets you automatically match supply with demand and provide predictable system performance—in spite of unpredictable demand.

IT organizations tasked with delivering services on demand can take advantage of Oracle's unique, application-driven virtualization that lets them rapidly and automatically provision and manage the entire application stack.

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Better Decisions with Business Intelligence

Based on a common enterprise information model, Oracle Business Intelligence foundation delivers a unified view of all your enterprise data—including relational databases, multidimensional OLAP databases, and operational transaction systems—no matter whether the data is from Oracle or non-Oracle sources. The same tools and technology used in Oracle's BI platform are also used in Oracle's analytic, enterprise performance management, industry, and transactional business applications.

Oracle Business Intelligence foundation is the underlying technology that makes it possible for all Oracle Fusion Applications to deliver analytical information within a transaction to help you take the right course of action.

Oracle Business Intelligence foundation is also at the heart of Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, the first engineered system designed to deliver high-performance analysis, modeling, and planning. By optimizing Oracle Business Intelligence foundation to take advantage of the extreme hardware in Oracle Exalytics, Oracle lets you support three times more users than you can with commodity hardware.

Oracle Business Intelligence foundation makes your BI content— including analytical applications and interactive dashboards—available on mobile devices, including the Apple iPad and iPhone. With Oracle's mobile BI and Oracle Exalytics working together, you can deliver analytics and advanced visualizations to mobile users at the speed of thought.

Whether taking action directly from a BI report or from a dashboard, Oracle Business Intelligence foundation delivers unique capabilities because it works with other middleware technologies—by sending a notification, triggering a workflow, navigating to more information, or even by using location-based data to determine what happens next.

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Engineered to Work Together at a Whole New Level

Oracle engineered systems are the ultimate expression of hardware and software engineered to work together.

By increasing the level of engineering and optimization in these systems, Oracle delivers dramatic improvements in performance, as well as massively simplified deployment and management capabilities. As Oracle's first engineered systems, Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, provided customers with a complete technology stack of servers, storage, and software for running consolidated database and application workloads at extreme performance levels and a lower overall cost. Oracle continues to build engineered systems that offer extreme solutions for big data, analytics, general purpose computing, and more.

Total Stack Management

Whether you have a traditional data center, a virtual environment, or a cloud computing environment, your IT administrators can use a single integrated console to monitor, manage, provision, and patch the entire Oracle stack. This makes it possible for IT to monitor the performance and availability of business services—not simply the technical components. It also makes it easier for IT to fulfill its agreed-upon service-level agreements (SLAs).

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With the insight you get about the actual user experience, you can quickly detect performance issues and immediately trace the source of the problem—starting with the network and going through the applications, middleware, and database layers, all the way to the virtual machines and hardware layers.

Oracle also offers a complete solution for managing the entire cloud lifecycle, including consolidation and capacity planning, metering and chargeback, self-service, testing, and monitoring.

Australian Finance Group (AFG) is the largest provider of mortgage brokering services in Australia (one of the top three in the world) and is growing rapidly. AFG wanted to offer its customers a better user experience with faster performance. They also wanted to update legacy applications with more-effective and more-cost-efficient solutions.

"At AFG we pride ourselves on using leading-edge technologies to harness competitive advantage, ensuring we can provide our brokers with the best possible service and performance," said Malcolm Watkins, AFG executive director. "Over the past three years, we have seen a quantum shift by brokers, from the CRM mobile client to the Web client, as data communication services improve across Australia."

A Complete Stack: Applications, Technology, Systems,
and Architecture

Oracle is in a unique position to offer customers a complete solution, because only Oracle owns all the layers in the technology stack. With access to the entire stack, Oracle can fine-tune products and optimize performance—for each product and at every layer.

Over the last 10 years, Oracle has worked toward its goal of enabling innovation by reducing complexity and simplifying IT through a complete, open, and integrated technology stack solution. During that time, Oracle

Invested in best-in-class industry and enterprise applications and engineered them to work together, delivering end-to-end business solutions while lowering integration costs.

Continued innovation in middleware and database, delivering the technology to power public and private clouds.

Acquired Sun Microsystems, giving Oracle engineers access to the hardware layers—storage, servers, and operating systems—in the systems layer of the technology stack. The systems section also includes no-cost virtualization which is fully tested, optimized, and integrated throughout the stack.

Oracle also designed a standards-based architecture and a set of Web services to drive consistency across the Oracle software stack. By reusing services across the stack, Oracle can offer higher-quality products and more innovation.

Oracle has spent US$24 billion in R&D since 2004, investing in product innovation and integration while developing next-generation technologies.

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Lojas Renner, Brazil's second-largest department store chain, had aggressive plans to double the size of the company in just five years by expanding into new geographic territories and opening 36 new stores.

Lojas Renner had collected massive amounts of retail data but wasn't able to use it to forecast demand or plan merchandise assortments for individual stores. Lojas Renner needed a modern retail solution that was flexible and sophisticated enough for both new and existing stores, and it needed a solution that could scale with the company as it grew. According to CIO Leandro Balbinot, demand planning at Lojas Renner "was not detailed, and was done by average—so we got average results." In addition, Lojas Renner was adamant that its people should focus on growing the business—not on deploying, upgrading, and maintaining an enormous IT function.

Chapter 2

Simplify Your Business

You've always been able to differentiate your business with enterprise software—as long as you were willing to write custom applications or heavily modify your best-of-breed software. And hire people to manage and maintain those custom systems.

But is this the best way to invest your resources?

It's Complicated

In the past, your IT organization has had little choice about how to meet the strategic and unique needs of your business—for example, how to interact with customers, fulfill their demands, and provide innovative products and services. You generally had two options.

Acquire a best-of-breed solution for your industry, integrate it with other applications, and then manage and maintain it as needed

Make extensive customizations to an existing system at great expense now, and then face another expense later when you need to do a complex upgrade

Either way, these projects were expensive and complicated. In the end, you were left with custom, legacy systems that would prove impossible to adapt in a way that would let you sustain any process or performance advantage.

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Bord Gáis wanted to take advantage of new opportunities when Ireland deregulated its electricity market in 2005. Bord Gáis began with a complete transformation of the company's IT capabilities, enabling them to better integrate customer service and billing for their 650,000 gas customers and also supply electricity. This strategy would allow Bord Gáis to offer a suite of residential and business energy services across the country.

"We needed a new platform to allow us to launch into that market," says Ashling Cunningham, Bord Gáis CIO. "We launched a massive marketing campaign, leveraging social as well as traditional media. We called it 'The Big Switch,' and we embraced that kind of reinvention message within our technology organization. Today you wouldn't recognize our core energy systems compared to what we were using a few years ago."Learn More

A Better Way: Complete Industry Solutions

Now consider a more efficient model—one that lets your IT group provide a complete, integrated solution designed to address the challenges unique to your industry. It's a simpler way to deliver IT, and it lets you concentrate on business growth and innovation.

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Oracle simplifies IT by designing and investing in best-in-class vertical and horizontal applications, and then engineering them to work together for your industry. With Oracle's industry solutions, you can

Dramatically reduce the time, effort, and risk associated with integrating business functions across your enterprise

Deliver best practice business processes and analytics that help you bring products to market faster, reduce your operations costs, and make better business decisions

Create a superior experience for your customers

"We have a major, multiyear technology strategy underway. Oracle's health insurance claims solution is, by far, the most significant, most important aspect of this five-year strategy."

Oracle delivers targeted, end-to-end solutions for more than 20 industries in which Oracle has expertise and a deep understanding of industry requirements. You can use individual solutions to address specific pain points, or leverage the full suite of industry-specific solutions to help achieve a large-scale transformation of your business.

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Telekom Malaysia (TM), the leading telecommunications company in Malaysia, contracted with the Malaysian government to provide high-speed broadband across the country in just 10 years. The ambitious project would upgrade the country's internet infrastructure and also create a foundation for delivering "triple-play" services (voice over broadband, IPTV, and high-speed internet).

TM's first step was to identify a platform that could help them deliver a better customer experience. They also needed a single point of contact, a self-service portal for customers and resellers, and the ability to deliver service to customers in a single visit. TM found the answers it needed in Oracle industry solutions for communications.1

1 "Does Oracle Go Top of the Class in Telecom Transformation?" IDC, 2011.

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Different Industries Need Different Solutions

Oracle uses industry-specific business process models and examines common pain points to develop comprehensive, industry-specific solutions. Even though the specifics vary from industry to industry, all of Oracle's industry solutions focus on powering three core areas.

Customer experience. Regardless of the channel or the stage in the customer lifecycle, customers expect a seamless and personal experience.

Strategic processes. The most important processes in every industry are the ones most closely tied to competitive differentiation and financial performance.

Complete business insights. The timely and actionable intelligence that's critical to every level of the organization.

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In all three areas, Oracle has the most complete portfolio of software and related intellectual property of any provider.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

STRATEGIC PROCESSES

Project and Portfolio Management

Product Lifecycle Management

Clinical Trial Management

Merchandise Management

Meter Data Management

Service Innovation

Policy Management

Claims Management

Transportation Management

Price and Promotion Management

Drug Safety

Store Operations

Network Management

Service Delivery and Fulfillment

Case Management

Core Banking

Contract Billing

Order to Cash

Patient and Payer Management

Point of Sale

Billing and Customer Care

Billing and Revenue Management

Tax and Revenue Management

Risk and Capital Management

COMPLETE BUSINESS INSIGHTS

This table highlights just a few of the industry solutions that Oracle is delivering across these critical areas of business differentiation.

Oracle industry experts stay with you far beyond the implementation process to help you quickly realize value from your investments.

Oracle's expertise is the result of more than 30 years of customer experience, and is delivered through a variety of consultants, support engineers, and industry experts who help you assess your business (and your business data), and recommend how best to use your industry-specific IT portfolio to achieve your business goals. Oracle's expertise is available through a variety of programs, including Oracle Insight, Oracle Consulting, Oracle Support, Oracle Managed Cloud Services, Oracle University and Oracle PartnerNetwork. Learn More

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University of Central Florida (UCF), the second-largest university in the United States, needed a powerful, scalable, and reliable IT infrastructure to support its continued growth. It also needed to address a growing user preference for Web-enabled portals and self-service options.

"For UCF, peak times come two or three times a year," says Bob Yanckello, chief technology officer at University of Central Florida. "It doesn't matter if the system operates the other 50 weeks—we have to have availability when we need it. Oracle understands this and provides the performance and scalability to handle the most-severe spikes." Learn More

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Chapter 3

Simplify Your Data Center

A survey shows that more than 50 percent of businesses will need a new data center within two years.1

Are you ready?

Transforming IT by optimizing your data center should be at the center of your IT strategy. At a minimum, the optimal data center must be able to help your organization

The Data Explosion in Your Data Center

It is estimated that by 2014, 85 percent of the data warehouses currently in use will be unable to meet new information volume and complexity demands.2

Will the choices you make today prepare your business to turn this information explosion into a competitive advantage, or are you at risk of falling behind?

More Isn't Always Better

According to IDC estimates, digital content grew to 2.7 zettabytes in 2012, up almost 50 percent from 2011. And 90 percent of this data was unstructured.3

In the past, when a data center needed to handle more data, the answer was simply to add more disk storage. Unfortunately, this approach no longer reflects today's reality.

Processor speeds have doubled every 18 months for the last 20 years, but disk performance has not increased at the same rate. This has led to an imbalance between data processing capabilities and the ability of the storage array to keep processors busy.

Processing bottlenecks slow access to the data.

Additional storage requires additional data center space, more cooling, and more power to run, so it's not the most cost-effective solution.

Turkcell, Turkey's leading mobile communications and technology company, is ranked third in Europe (16th in the world) by number of subscribers. Each day, Turkcell's networks process about 1.5 billion call records, which the company stores in 500 databases.

With the volume of data surging in recent years, Turkcell needed ways to rein in its sprawling hardware footprint, which had been growing to accommodate the company's expanding data processing and storage needs. "Data storage requirements have been doubling every year," said Metin Yilmaz, IT manager at Turkcell. "It was a never-ending race to match the business's performance and capacity needs." Learn More

Get More Value Faster

No matter how much data your organization handles today, that amount is growing—and will continue to grow—at unprecedented rates. Solutions that offer more storage as the only way to handle bigger data volumes don't adequately address the problems of processing bottlenecks and limited real-time accessibility.

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If adding more storage doesn't solve the problem, how do you handle this massive inflow of data? Organizations that are successfully handling explosive data growth focus on

Achieving extreme performance and scalability in their data architecture

Extracting value from all their enterprise data

For Merck, a global healthcare leader, strategic competitive advantage comes from having productive scientists—especially since the company spends US$8 billion a year on research and development.

Merck runs one of the largest single chemical databases in the world on Oracle Exadata—with more than 5,000 concurrent users. Combined with the CambridgeSoft ELN, Oracle Exadata lets scientists do more sophisticated searches and get faster access to information than was previously possible. Learn More

Managing Big Data with Oracle Engineered Systems

The biggest challenge associated with massive amounts of data is getting the data to a point where it can be used for real-time reporting and analysis. With Oracle's engineered systems, you can create highly efficient, large-scale data warehouses to manage all your enterprise information.

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Data Warehousing With its capacity to move large volumes of data efficiently, Oracle Exadata Database Machine is an ideal platform for large data warehouses. Innovative technologies such as Exadata Smart Scan, Exadata Smart Flash Cache, and Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression work together to deliver extreme performance for data warehousing and OLTP workloads.

For example, by using compression to reduce the size of data warehousing tables, Oracle Exadata can scan data faster. Compared to traditional storage infrastructures, Oracle Exadata offers a 10-fold improvement in query performance, and with a compression ratio that's 10 to 50 times better than conventional data warehousing and storage solutions, Oracle Exadata lets you store more data for a lower cost.

Data Center Innovation with Oracle Exadata

The world's first database machine that delivers extreme performance for both data warehousing and transaction processing applications, Oracle Exadata Database Machine is ideal for consolidating mixed workloads on private clouds. It's a massively scalable, fully redundant, and highly secure package of software, servers, storage, and networking. Oracle Exadata includes Exadata Smart Flash Cache for caching all of your active data—dramatically improving transaction response times and throughput. With Oracle Exadata, customers can consolidate database applications, store up to 10 times more data, search data up to 10 times faster, and make faster business decisions in real time.

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Big Data
Big data refers to unstructured data—such as the data in blogs, social media content, e-mail, sensors, and photographs—that can be mined for useful information. By combining and analyzing this potentially valuable information alongside transactional data, you can gain new insights into your business.

Increased Efficiency (and Lower Costs) in Your Data Center

If global data grows 40 percent per year as projected,4 businesses will need more storage, more computing resources, more electricity, and more space for more servers. That's good for the IT industry.

But is it good for your bottom line?

Silos Are Expensive Data Centers

Traditional data centers often house isolated systems that allow applications to run on dedicated technology stacks. The silos are different, so each system is

Tied to its own physical infrastructure—requiring "forklift" upgrades to expand and scale the system

Sized for peak loads—resulting in excess capacity that goes unused most of the time

Deployed separately—with its own individual middleware, database, servers, and storage

Maintained separately—requiring the IT staff to know different administrative tools and requirements for each deployment

Optimizing for Efficiency

Developing a strategy for delivering IT services more efficiently is key to reducing what your business spends on IT infrastructure, facilities, and utilities. To be more efficient, you have to be more effective about managing the capacity of your data center and about using your data center resources. While global businesses must operate 24/7 with no unplanned downtime, they also need to control skyrocketing operational costs.

4 "Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity," McKinsey Global Institute, May 2011.

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Measuring the Efficiency of a Data Center

Green data centers use state-of-the-art power management, cooling, and space design to cut energy consumption and operating costs. The Uptime Institute reports that the average data center power usage effectiveness (PUE)—a measurement of how efficiently a data center uses power—is 1.8. In contrast, Oracle's recently opened green data center in Utah has a planned PUE between 1.3 and 1.5.5

By optimizing your existing data center, you can significantly increase IT efficiency along with system performance, availability, and security. When you standardize and consolidate the components in your data center and use virtualization technology to increase the usage capacity of those components, you're able to deploy new services quickly and dynamically allocate resources on demand.

Standardize
By limiting the number of hardware platforms, software configurations, and IT services your business supports, you can reduce the amount of time and money required to procure, provision, and install different IT resources. And you can eliminate the complexity of maintaining heterogeneous systems. Standardizing on a common set of building blocks lets your IT organization rapidly deploy predefined configurations. Instead of hiring people with knowledge of a specific computing or storage platform, you can build a workforce with common, interchangeable skills—a workforce that can deliver effective and cost-efficient IT services.

5 Oracle IT operations.

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And because Oracle's best-in-class components are built according to industry open standards, you can still leverage third-party and legacy systems when you need them to create the best IT strategy for your business.

Consolidate
For many organizations, consolidation is the first step on the path to a private cloud. New hardware technologies offer more computing power in less space, making it possible to reduce your server and storage footprint without adversely affecting performance.

You can consolidate operating systems, databases, and applications to simplify overall manageability. With Oracle Enterprise Manager, you can even streamline and automate consolidation tasks for any type of workload. The improved operational efficiency you get from consolidating components in your data center helps you eliminate duplication and streamline resource management—resulting in significant cost savings.

Virtualize
Any time you have a server dedicated to a single operating system and application, you inevitably end up with an underutilized asset. With virtualization and clustering technologies, IT organizations can pool hardware and software into shared resources that can be allocated—as needed—to balance supply and demand and to maximize the utilization of resources.

Many organizations rely on just one type of virtualization and therefore lack the ability to support different workloads. With Oracle's comprehensive set of virtualization technologies—including support for x86 and SPARC servers as well as virtualization and clustering built into the database and middleware—you can run all your production workloads in a shared-resource environment.

Application-Driven Virtualization

IT organizations focusing on delivering complete solutions see virtualization as a way to speed the delivery of IT services and help optimize their data center. Oracle's unique approach to virtualization lets you deploy a complete hardware and software stack that takes advantage of server, desktop, and storage virtualization so you can manage the entire system within a single, integrated framework.

Oracle VM 3 is Oracle's server virtualization and management solution that makes enterprise applications—in both Oracle and non-Oracle environments—easier to deploy, manage, and support. Oracle VM increases IT efficiency and agility while reducing operating costs, support costs, and resource requirements.

Oracle virtualization solutions can help you consolidate IT resources right now and—when you're ready—can deliver cloud services rapidly and efficiently.

Automate

By automating IT management tasks, you can dramatically cut unplanned downtime due to manual errors, configuration drift, and untested changes as well as enable faster delivery of IT services. Oracle offers a unique approach to IT automation by providing applications-to-disk management capabilities—from infrastructure to development platforms, to databases and business applications. Oracle's management solutions can help you monitor non-Oracle technologies as well as manage the entire cloud lifecycle across your private and hybrid clouds.

Prepare to Be Surprised

With Oracle's complete technology stack, you can choose the path to data center optimization that's right for your business.

To make incremental improvements to a highly customized data center, use Oracle's best-in-class components.

To address a particular challenge with a more comprehensive solution, Oracle's optimized solutions provide a lower-risk, guided deployment.

By using these approaches to optimize your data center, you set the stage for efficiency at every level of the technology stack and throughout your data center.

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Oracle IT Gets Results with Data Center Optimization

Several years ago, Oracle embarked on its own journey to transform Oracle IT from a tactical provider of individualized services to a strategic provider of scalable, end-to-end service solutions for the enterprise. The business objective was simple: support Oracle's mergers and acquisitions strategy by reducing the time, resources, and expense associated with integrating newly acquired companies into Oracle IT. The following table shows some of the results.

Consolidation

Standardization

Virtualization

IT costs as percentage of revenue decreased from 2.63% in 2006 to 1.85% in 2009

Consolidated 40 data centers into 3

Reduced annual growth rate of utilities usage from more than 100% to less than 4%, also lowering CO2 emissions

Server utilization increased from 7% to 70%

Faster backup and recovery, from 6 hours to less than 1 hour

Reduced supported platforms from 20 to 3 and application production instances from 51 to 1

Faster integration of acquired companies

Increased storage compression from 0 to 40%

Supported more clients and external customers using only 20% of the hardware previously required

Reduced provisioning time from months to minutes

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Located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a U.S. Department of Energy facility that houses the world's largest laser. LLNL uses an Oracle VM-enabled virtualized server farm to re-create the physical environment and conditions that exist inside the sun. The system is called Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE), and each time NIF runs an experiment, cameras, oscilloscopes, and an array of instrumentation collect a series of measurements about the event.

"It's only because of virtualization that we've been able to dedicate machines to specific workloads," said Tim Frazier, associate project manager of NIF. "In the old days of 'bare metal,' that would have been too wasteful, and we couldn't have afforded it. Virtualization is the way for us now at NIF, and we expect it to be for LIFE in the future."

Enable Innovation with Your Data Center

Top technology trends for 2013 include big data, cloud services, enterprise mobility, gamification, Internet of Things, and social business. To take advantage of new technologies that can differentiate your business, you need to have the right infrastructure in place.

Is your IT organization agile enough to respond effectively to the rapidly changing needs of your business?

Transform the Way IT Delivers Services with Cloud

IT innovation starts with the data center. To change the way your organization delivers IT services to your business, you need an infrastructure that provides high availability and scalability and can help you meet business demands faster.

"[With] our cloud offering, we can be much more flexible and move to a usage-based billing in close to realtime, which we couldn't do in the past."

Around the world, organizations are rethinking how to deliver IT services so they can

Respond to business needs quickly

Reduce costs

Empower innovation workers

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As IT organizations make the transition from tactical providers of services to strategic partners in the business, data centers must evolve to reflect this updated role. Traditional models for delivering IT services are simply too slow to be practical in an environment where changes can happen—literally—overnight.

One Size Does Not Fit All

The IT industry has many ideas for remaking your data center, but before you settle on one, make sure you're not re-creating an old problem with a new name. For example, the promise of lower costs, rapid deployment, and flexible capacity makes the cloud an attractive option for many businesses—assuming it's done right. Unfortunately, in a survey, fewer than half of the companies found that cloud computing delivered the expected IT agility.6

Before choosing a cloud provider, consider the ability to consume cloud services in whatever way best fits your business needs. The flexibility to deploy certain business applications and data in a public cloud, others in a private cloud, or a combination of both (aka hybrid cloud) helps you align your cloud strategy with your business initiatives.

Answers in the Cloud

Once you've taken the steps to standardize, consolidate, virtualize, and automate your data center, implementing the self-service and elastic scalability capabilities that you need to move to cloud computing is a relatively small effort. A private cloud environment offers

On-demand access to virtualized pools of computing resources

Lower costs through shared services and self-service access

Rapid deployment of new services through automated or self-service provisioning

More-efficient resource utilization with better capacity planning

Greater accountability with metering and chargeback

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Through its two subsidiaries, PHH Corporation offers end-to-end mortgage solutions to customers and manages nearly 570,000 vehicles for corporate and government clients across North America. Both subsidiaries have spent years building their information systems, but now PHH needs to integrate the diverse IT infrastructures so the corporation can have greater agility in a rapidly evolving market and capitalize on new business opportunities.

"Imagine two full platforms with completely distinct solutions up and down the stack," said Chris Brewer, vice president of platform technologies at PHH. "Both of our divisions have grown organically through acquisitions, resulting in silos of individual solutions."

GE Healthcare depends on Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c to manage provisioning, chargeback, and metering capabilities for Siebel applications running in a private cloud. "It used to take us three weeks to provision a development or test instance and now it takes us eight hours."

Oracle Cloud Applications
Oracle's cloud applications provide complete business processes spanning a wide range of functions. You can choose to deploy them any way you want—in a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment. These enterprise-grade applications also will meet even the most-stringent performance and security requirements.

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Oracle Cloud Platform
By using a shared platform for database and middleware technologies, you can increase your asset utilization and provide elastic capacity on demand. The Oracle Cloud platform lets you quickly develop and deploy new applications to support the rapid pace of change in your business and includes SOA-based business process management, data integration, identity management, as well as user interaction and cloud management services.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud are the ideal building blocks for delivering platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions because of their unmatched speed and consolidation efficiency. And if you want to run both Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic on the same systems, you can use Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. Learn More

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"A Really Fast Computer"

Oracle SPARC SuperCluster is an Oracle engineered system that combines the computing power of Oracle's SPARC T4 processor, the performance and scalability of Oracle Solaris 11, the optimized database performance of Oracle Exadata, and the accelerated middleware processing of Oracle Exalogic.

As the world's fastest general purpose engineered system, this integrated, applications-to-disk solution delivers the highest performance, security, and manageability with the lowest total cost of ownership. It can deploy multiple databases and applications as well as multiple tiers of applications—all while providing lightning-fast improvements on data compression, queries, OLTP response times, and Java middleware performance.

Unified Platform for Managing the Cloud
With Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, you can plan, build, and manage your private cloud. This unified management platform provides self-service capabilities for consuming all your cloud services, including IaaS, PaaS, and applications. It includes complete cloud lifecycle management capabilities, from capacity planning and self-service provisioning to policy-based resource management and chargeback. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides a single point of control to manage your entire technology stack and cloud services—whether it's monitoring health and availability, managing configurations and performance, or automating provisioning and patching. Learn More

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Chapter 4

Unleash Innovation

Research shows that the productivity of innovation workers can increase by 50 percent when companies apply technology more precisely—with solutions tailored to specific jobs or roles.1

Are you empowering your innovation workers with the tools to do more?

The Evolution of the Innovation Worker

In today's business environment, it's not just knowledge that has become the underlying commodity—the value lies in knowing how to use that knowledge to innovate.

Intellectual property, brand value, process know-how, and other manifestations of brain power were responsible for generating an estimated 70 percent of all U.S. market value created over the past three decades.2 They likely had similar effects in other advanced economies as well.

The knowledge worker of the 1960s is giving way to what Oracle refers to as the innovation worker—someone who uses creativity and innovation to do a different type of work in the current business environment.

For example, at any time, anywhere in the world, an innovation worker must be able to

Analyze complex information

Collaborate with global peer groups

Generate and test new ideas

Create new solutions and business processes

The skill set needed for today's workplace is more complex than ever, and includes the ability to analyze information, solve problems, make decisions, and think creatively.

Helping Workers Innovate

To empower people to drive innovation and change, organizations must first identify the skills and the types of information that innovation workers need in order to be effective. In other words, they must learn how innovation workers work.

Oracle pioneered this approach in developing its next-generation applications. For example, Oracle Fusion Applications don't force users to integrate different work activities themselves. The applications do it for them—through analytics and social computing that are embedded in the business activity.

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Once businesses can identify the skills and information needed by innovation workers, they can help them be more productive by providing the right kinds of technology solutions, including

Workflows for managing information and tasks

Business intelligence

Portals

Business rules

Content management

Business process management

Collaboration tools

Engineering Solutions for the Innovation Worker

When Oracle's User Experience team conducted onsite visits to observe how people used technology to do their job, they saw users toggling among transactions, e-mail, chat, search, and group workspaces, as well as between analytical dashboards and reports.

As a result of this customer input, Oracle engineers completely redesigned the next generation of Oracle Applications—Oracle Fusion Applications—to work the way most people work today.

Next-Generation Solutions: Oracle Fusion Applications

Oracle Fusion Applications is a complete suite of modular applications that can coexist with existing Oracle Applications and is based 100 percent on industry open standards.

Because Oracle Fusion Applications were designed from the ground up using the latest technology advances in Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle engineers were able to structure and assign information, analytical data, and tasks to particular jobs or roles, incorporating best practices gathered from Oracle's thousands of customers. Oracle engineers then built the business processes for Oracle Fusion Applications using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach—the same approach that lets you quickly create the unique, custom-fit processes and extensions that can differentiate your business.

Alcoa, the world's leading producer of both primary and fabricated aluminum, chose Oracle Fusion Applications to support continued global growth and innovation.

"Alcoa selected Oracle because the company provides a total solution, from hardware through software and services," said Nancy Wolk, Alcoa's chief information officer. "We believe this 'single source' approach best meets our needs. In addition, adding Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management to the existing Oracle E-Business Suite will provide us with required new functionality while leveraging the systems already in place."Learn More

Whether a job requires interacting with teams of people, making information-based decisions, or ensuring that operations are running smoothly, Oracle has systemically thought through what is needed for each task, and then brought together all the tasks for a particular role.

Applications That Empower

With Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle engineers built a complete user experience, with applications that empower innovation workers by providing them with the right information, the right processes, and the best technology.

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Specifically, these intuitive applications include

Business intelligence (BI) embedded within transactions so users can make informed decisions on the spot

Embedded social computing so users can collaborate and communicate instantly

Streamlined workflows so users can complete tasks quickly

Highly configurable business processes so users can innovate at a faster pace

"Principal Financial Group is very good at financial management. We want to apply the same level of rigor and analysis to human capital as we do to our financial assets."

Streamlining Workflows

With Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle streamlined many of the activities that employees do and set a new standard for empowering innovation workers. The redesigned user experience in Oracle Fusion Applications supports specific business roles and delivers all the information necessary for users to take action.

Oracle's investment in a complete user experience for Oracle Fusion Applications also benefits its other application product lines, including Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle's PeopleSoft, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, JD Edwards World, Siebel Customer Relationship Management, and Hyperion. With every new release, Oracle continues to deliver user experience innovations that make getting from point A to point B simple—no matter which Oracle Applications you use.

Innovating in the Cloud

Cloud computing is changing the way technology enables business innovation. Businesses like the ease and speed of deployment that the cloud offers. Unfortunately, most niche cloud providers use a decade-old, one-size-fits-all model that simply can't meet the specific—and changing—business and service-level requirements of modern organizations.

In contrast, Oracle designed its enterprise-grade cloud applications from the ground up to have the simplicity and flexibility that customers want, and the performance and horsepower they need.

Because Oracle Fusion Applications are built on a common, standards-based platform and a single code line, you can switch between software-as-a-service (SaaS) and on-premises deployments. You can choose to deploy Oracle Fusion Applications in any cloud environment, including

In Oracle Cloud as subscription-based services (SaaS)

In a private cloud that Oracle manages in one of its state-of-the art data centers

"[Oracle] Fusion CRM is built on a single code line. That means I can run the application on the cloud, on premises, [and] on demand. It gives me the flexibility to have the application where it's most efficient and most cost-effective."

The Innovation Foundation: Oracle Fusion Middleware

Innovation is key to competitiveness, but if your business can't keep up with constant change, you're losing a winnable fight. Once upon a time, modifying an enterprise application meant rewriting and retesting code every time you made a change. But that was before open, standards-based, best-of-breed middleware technologies provided a common applications platform—and before Oracle Fusion Middleware.

With Oracle Fusion Middleware, you can take advantage of the same technologies and the same development platform used in Oracle Fusion Applications. You can keep pace with new business demands by extending and maximizing your existing technology investment with embedded analytics and social collaboration, and mobile and cloud computing.

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Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a foundation for innovation that gives you

The flexibility to adapt and respond to change

Agile and intelligent business applications and processes

Consistent insights for information-based decisions

Secure and rich connections among workers, teams, and customers

Accelerated development and reduced IT costs

University of Virginia staff discovered that an upgrade doesn't have to be a time-consuming and expensive procedure. The key is using industry-standard technologies designed to create flexible interfaces and business processes between old and new programs.3

"We will likely be able to take advantage of Oracle Fusion Applications sooner rather than later because we already know how to integrate them," says Virginia Evans, assistant vice president for integrated system deployment and support. "And the SOA skills are already in-house."Learn More

3 "SOA with Smarts: University of Virginia Makes a New-School Change to a Venerable Application," Alan Joch, Profit, August 2011.

City officials in New York City needed to show federal officials that they could meet stringent reporting requirements in order to qualify for funds from the US$800 billion stimulus package signed by President Obama in 2008.

"When Mayor Bloomberg told us to put the [citywide performance reporting] data on the Web, we upgraded to Oracle Business Intelligence. We made the investment to build a solution that would support larger and different things coming down the pike," said James Perazzo, assistant commissioner, Web and New Media Operations, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.Learn More

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Connecting People and Information

Innovation workers rely on a broad set of tools in today's workplace. Oracle Fusion Middleware helps IT organizations give existing enterprise applications the rich social networking capabilities and content sharing that users have come to expect in consumer software.

Oracle WebCenter is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware that provides a user engagement platform for social business that connects people—both inside and outside the organization—and information. It delivers intuitive, personalized, and contextual user experiences for enterprise applications, both by enhancing existing enterprise applications and by creating new composite applications. It also enables users to build collaborative communities across disparate applications and business processes.

Innovating Faster

For many, the cloud's promise of improved business agility and faster innovation has fallen short of expectations. The proprietary platforms and cloud silos of niche providers make it difficult to integrate and extend business processes and applications with other cloud or on-premises systems—systems that are often required to execute a business process.

"By utilizing [Oracle Fusion Middleware], that whole complexity got reduced and we were able to rapidly develop and deploy both application services for [two] environments almost at the same time."

Oracle Fusion Middleware—the same platform used in Oracle's enterprise-grade cloud applications—offers a different approach based on portability between clouds and durable integration. This next-generation applications platform is based on 100 percent open standards, so you aren't locked into one deployment model when your business requirements change. Oracle Fusion Middleware allows you to create rich applications—no matter whether the applications are deployed on premises or in the cloud.

In addition, Oracle Fusion Middleware has tools and a common development framework that can help you

Define business logic

Create user interfaces

Expose applications as Web services

Orchestrate applications into streamlined business processes

With Oracle's complete SOA platform, your IT organization can rapidly design, assemble, deploy, and manage these adaptable business applications and—with Oracle's business process management tools—even bring the task of modeling business processes directly to the business analysts. Your organization will benefit as business and IT collaborate on process improvements.

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Going Mobile

Oracle can help on-the-go mobile workers be productive anywhere the job takes them. Oracle Fusion Applications are built natively in Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) technology, making them immediately available and certified to run on any mobile Web browser. Committed to delivering cutting-edge mobile capabilities across the enterprise, Oracle expects to offer rich, on-device, cross-platform mobile capabilities for its next-generation business applications, including tight device services integration along with a mobile-optimized user interface.

Oracle ADF, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, provides a single framework for developing both mobile and desktop enterprise applications. Oracle ADF Mobile Client extends Oracle ADF to mobile users and lets developers rapidly build mobile applications that support the users who are accessing critical business data through on-device mobile clients or mobile browsers. With Oracle ADF Mobile Client, you can develop an application once and then deploy it to multiple mobile device platforms and channels.

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Chapter 5

Engineered for Choice

It's not that you want to have it all, but you do want the combination of capabilities, deployment options, and hardware and software solutions that works best for your business today—and tomorrow.

You don't need everything. What you need is choice.

The Truth About Choice

Choice has always been part of enterprise IT solutions, but in too many cases, choice meant limits.

In the past, IT organizations could choose to automate tasks for a group (such as the Accounting department), but they couldn't link those tasks to other departments (such as Finance) because the proprietary software they used was too costly and too difficult to integrate.

Then you could choose how to automate business processes across the entire enterprise. However, even if you hadn't selected proprietary software, you had to implement the whole system—even the pieces you didn't need. What's more, when it was time for a new release, everything had to be upgraded at once, including integrations with other systems.

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And today, you can choose a cloud deployment to avoid the problem of monolithic upgrades, but unless your entire business is running in the cloud, you're back where you started—with silos of information that you can't share across the enterprise.

You've always had choices, just difficult ones.

Simplifying Choice

Now you can choose a better way.

Best-in-class products that can stand alone or work together

Solutions that can be deployed on premises, in the cloud, or even in a hybrid environment without creating isolated silos

A complete, applications-to-disk stack that is engineered according to open standards and offers the benefit of preintegrated systems without the risk of vendor lock-in

Many vendors claim to have the right IT solution for your business, but too often, their offerings force you to commit to one choice over another. Only Oracle can offer a complete, open, and integrated technology stack that provides real choice, so you can make the right decision about the products and services you need for your business.

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Best in Class and Integrated

Oracle's complete, open, and integrated product strategy means having best-in-class products at every layer of the technology stack—and within each layer—and engineering them to work together.

You can start with individual products that address specific business challenges and then add more later. Or you can take advantage of Oracle's integrated solutions to transform entire areas of your business. With high-performance products that stand alone or work together, you get both best-in-class capabilities and simplified integration.

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The Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) IT team had all the tools it needed to begin transforming the way it created the applications and services at the heart of the company's competitive differentiation. The key to that transformation is a service-oriented architecture—powered by Oracle Fusion Middleware—that lets the IT team create customer-focused applications and link them to an existing enterprise system.

"Every time a user logs in, there is a dashboard that tells them exactly what they need to do each day to take care of the customer. By providing the right information to the right person at the right time, OOCL can give customers the kind of high-quality service that will set the company apart from competitors," says Belinda So, deputy general manager of Information Services at OOCL. Learn More

Oracle also has best-in-class solutions within each layer of the technology stack. For example, industry analysts recognize Oracle's leadership in several middleware categories, including

Application server

Business intelligence

Business process management

Data integration

Enterprise content management

Enterprise portal

Identity and access management

Service-oriented architecture

Whether Oracle builds or acquires its best-in-class products, all are engineered, tested, certified, and managed to work with all other products in the Oracle stack, and—through industry open standards—with third-party and legacy products as well.

In the Cloud, On Premise, and Everywhere Else

To meet the diverse needs of its customers, Oracle offers a choice of deployment models in addition to its on-premise deployments, including private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid options.

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Many organizations are moving to the cloud, but most enterprises will need a mix of deployment models for the foreseeable future. Organizations need greater control for specific areas of their business (highly regulated processes, for example) and prefer private cloud or on-premises deployments. In other areas of the business—especially where moving quickly is a priority—a software-as-a service public cloud solution may be the right choice.

No matter which type of deployment or combination of deployments you choose, they all need to work together. For some organizations that's a problem, but for Oracle customers, it's just one more way of "having it all."

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Oracle Cloud

Oracle has a history of making big bets on the future, much like it has done over the last seven years—investing billions of dollars in engineering, innovation, and strategic acquisitions to become the most comprehensive cloud provider on the planet. Today, more than 10,000 customers and more than 25 million users worldwide rely on Oracle Cloud Services.

Oracle offers a complete suite of enterprise-grade applications across human capital management, talent management, enterprise resource planning, sales and marketing, and customer service and support. In addition, Oracle's application services are enriched with modern social capabilities, including social marketing, social engagement and monitoring, and social networking for purposeful collaboration. And, with the most complete platform, developers can extend applications or build their own using Oracle's database and Java services.

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Cloud Computing with Oracle

Oracle has the broadest and most comprehensive portfolio of public, private, and hybrid cloud offerings in the industry. Whether you've decided to build a private cloud, have Oracle design and manage your private cloud, or take advantage of public cloud services, Oracle has solutions at every layer.

Software as a service (SaaS) includes applications

Platform as a service (PaaS) includes middleware and database technologies as well as social capabilities

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) includes servers, storage, operating systems and virtualization

Public Cloud

Private Cloud Products

Managed Cloud Services

Application Services

Cloud Applications

Applications On Demand

Social Services
Platform Services

Cloud Platform

Technology On Demand

Common Infrastructure Services

Cloud Infrastructure

Technology On Demand

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Social. Mobile. Complete.

With the most comprehensive cloud portfolio in the industry, Oracle allows you to adopt cloud computing for as much (or as little) of your IT services as your business needs—and do it at the pace that makes sense for your business. You have the option of building your own private cloud or having Oracle host and manage your applications and technology. You can also choose from Oracle's broad suite of subscription-based application services, platform services, social services, and common infrastructure services.

Just because Oracle's cloud solutions are comprehensive, it doesn't mean one size fits all. Oracle gives you the choice of public, private, and hybrid cloud deployment models, as well as the opportunity to have your cloud in your data center, one of Oracle's global data centers, or any combination thereof. Oracle also gives you the flexibility of choosing an upgrade window that best fits your business. By optimizing the entire stack of hardware and software, Oracle has the unique ability to protect your data at every layer and federate identity management across on-premise and cloud environments.

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Herbalife had two primary IT mandates—to protect the business through operational excellence and drive value through innovation. Instead of taking on both mandates, its IT organization decided to outsource IT operations to Oracle and keep strategic activities in house.

"If we're going to have someone outside of these walls manage our operations, then Oracle was an easy solution. They own the hardware. They own the software. They own the database. They own the services. From Oracle, I can buy a business solution instead of just widgets that fit together. It was a huge advantage and an easy decision for us at the end of the day."

Industry Open Standards and Beyond

Oracle has engineered each layer of the Oracle stack according to open industry standards so customers have all the benefits of preintegrated components that are designed, tested, and certified to work together, but they aren't forced to purchase unnecessary hardware or software. The result is that Oracle makes IT simpler—without the compromises associated with proprietary systems.

When enterprise software is built with standard interfaces, customers can easily extend their systems and respond quickly to changes in the marketplace or in their business. Open standards protect your technology investments by reducing vendor lock-in and lowering the cost of integrating heterogeneous environments.

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At Verizon Communications, the leadership decided to launch a shared-services IT organization to streamline operations. Because IT had to deliver a high-availability, low-cost solution that was scalable (to support future growth) as well as easy to maintain and modify, Verizon chose to adopt Oracle's common technology stack built on open standards.

"We were looking for a vendor that could help minimize the pain of integration and adhere to standards," says Fari Ebrahimi, senior vice president and CIO of Verizon Services Operations. "At the time, probably the only vendor that was moving in that direction and providing that type of technology at an enterprise level was Oracle."

Because Oracle has engineered each layer in the Oracle stack according to open industry standards, you don't have to use Oracle products in every layer of your technology stack to get the benefits of Oracle's integrated technology.

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In fact, you can benefit from using Oracle products anywhere in your existing IT landscape: many Oracle customers have specialized components that they continue to use. Oracle tests the interoperability of the Oracle stack with third-party components so customers will know which ones will work together and can choose the right combination of products for their business.

Open Standards from the Start

Since as far back as the 1970s, Oracle has been at the forefront of developing open standards. Oracle worked to establish open standards for Structured Query Language (SQL), the foundation of Oracle Database. Oracle has also been involved with the Java development process—an extremely important technology to Oracle—ensuring it remains the premier programming language and computing platform. Oracle Fusion Middleware is built on Java, with a services infrastructure that uses SOA standards such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and service component architecture (SCA). Oracle is currently taking the lead to develop an industry standard to ensure the interoperability of applications across cloud environments.

Oracle is also a major contributor to key open source initiatives, including MySQL, GlassFish, Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, NetBeans, VirtualBox, Xen, and InnoDB. Hundreds of Oracle engineers work in more than 65 standards-setting forums in nearly 300 technical working groups to keep Oracle products extensible and compatible with prevailing industry standards.

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A Range of Solutions with Transforming Technology

With Oracle's high-performance products that stand alone or work together, you can get the best fit for your business by choosing fully integrated solutions with best-in-class capabilities.

"Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration provides us a platform where we can visualize a complete, integrated view of our supply chain business processes, optimize the correct supply chain solution for our customer, and align our business in support of those customer objectives."

Oracle also gives you the flexibility to make real choices. For example, you can start with an individual module to address a specific business challenge, and deploy additional modules later for preintegrated, purpose-built solutions that can transform entire areas of your business.

Oracle offers a range of products, solutions, and deployment models to give you choices for your business.

Best-in-Breed Components. Oracle has solutions for every level of the technology stack for value-added, custom deployments.

Oracle Optimized Solutions. These predefined solutions offer lower costs and higher productivity by integrating components from Oracle's entire technology stack. They can be deployed as individual components in an existing system or as complete enterprise solutions. Learn More

Choosing Experience

Making the right choice means getting the right help at the right point in your project. Oracle has programs staffed by industry, business, and IT experts to help you make the best choices for your business. Oracle expertise is available through a variety of programs, including Oracle Insight, Oracle Consulting, Oracle Support, Oracle Managed Cloud Services, Oracle University, and Oracle PartnerNetwork.

OnStar Gets Results

OnStar chose Oracle SOA Suite, part of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to build an architecture optimized for quick change. The new SOA-based infrastructure helped OnStar reduce development costs by 40 percent and allowed them to reinvest those savings into creating new services for customers. OnStar can now quickly take advantage of emerging channels (such as mobile devices), but the biggest benefit is the speed and flexibility with which OnStar can launch new features to keep its service fresh and ahead of the competition.

Telekom Malaysia Gets Results

With Oracle industry solutions for communications, Telekom Malaysia (TM) was able to launch two next-generation products in fewer than eight months. Projects of this magnitude are notorious for unforeseen circumstances that can cost money and cause delays—but Suharti Mohd Ali, the project director at Telekom Malaysia, says the Oracle implementation was the first time in her entire career that she didn't miss a single deadline or milestone.2

2 "Does Oracle Go Top of the Class in Telecom Transformation?", IDC, 2011.

University of Central Florida Gets Results

To continue building on its successful "online, not in line" model, UCF adopted a multifaceted solution combining Oracle software and hardware that included Oracle's PeopleSoft applications running on Oracle Database 11g. This combination manages the university's financials, human resources, academic reports, online courses, class assignments, and financial aid. It helps UCF provide reliable access for more than 50,000 students, faculty, and staff during even the busiest days of the academic year, and offers users an array of self-service and Web options that frees them from long lines and cumbersome paperwork.

Oracle Expertise Makes the Difference

Oracle Insight

Based on your business objectives, the Oracle Insight group can help you decide which vertical solutions to adopt and in what order. They can also provide fact-based assessments of how to achieve the maximum return on investment using your company's data. You can then incorporate only those solutions that are appropriate for your business.

Oracle University delivers superior education and certification services to successfully enable organizations adopting Oracle technologies. Ensure your staff has the required skills to meet your business goals with flexible and globally available training solutions developed and delivered by the experts at Oracle.

Oracle Partners

Together, Oracle and more than 25,000 partners provide customers around the world with industry-leading solutions and services that address business needs. Oracle partners help customers deploy world-class Oracle products, but also offer extended capabilities that can address any specific functional, market, or industry needs you may have. Find an Oracle partner to help with your IT solutions.

Bord Gáis Gets Results

Using Oracle products and technology as the basis for the transformation of its IT system, Bord Gáis was able to deliver excellent customer service to both existing gas customers and its new electricity customers. In addition, the company saw increased operational efficiencies and was able to easily comply with new mandated regulations.

University of Virginia Gets Results

Past experience taught University of Virginia that upgrades involving significant enterprise applications were usually difficult, involved, and time-consuming. That premise changed when it chose Oracle SOA Suite and a loosely coupled SOA approach instead of a heavily customized solution to automate a complex, manual reporting process. In addition to an ease of integration that also bodes well for future upgrades, University of Virginia was able to cut its reporting process timeline by 50 percent—from 90 days to 45 days.

New York City Gets Results

With Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, New York City efficiently managed US$7 billion in federal stimulus funds. The solution also allowed the city to achieve Mayor Bloomberg's goals of transparency, accessibility, and accountability in city government, making it a model of transparency for government organizations and the only city-built system to receive recognition from Good Jobs First as one of the best fund-tracking sites in the U.S.

Orient Overseas Container Line Gets Results

OOCL was already an Oracle customer at the database level when it decided to turn to Oracle again for a new project. OOCL chose Oracle Fusion Middleware to power its new service-oriented architecture, orchestrate business processes, and deliver data from the databases to Java applications. OOCL used Oracle Enterprise Manager to enable system monitoring and management for the database cluster and all middleware components; Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Coherence ensure scalability and high availability through transparent failover, load balancing, and fast transaction processing.

Herbalife Gets Results

With Oracle, Herbalife has the choice of deploying applications on premise, having Oracle run them as a managed service or using Oracle Cloud Application Services. Says Senior Vice President and CIO, Mark Schissel, "It was important for us to work with a vendor that offered multiple deployment options. Whether it's on premise, a managed service, or software as a service, the answer is different depending on our business circumstances. Oracle is the one vendor that can provide all of these models and control the entire solution: the hardware, the software, and the services around it. For us, it was an easy decision to use Oracle Cloud Services."

Australian Finance Group Ltd. (AFG) Gets Results

Consulting with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services, AFG selected Oracle Exadata as the key technology for its strategic infrastructure. The company quickly achieved significant performance improvement for Oracle Applications, delivered high system availability for customers, and reduced the total cost of ownership. The move to Oracle Exadata let AFG continue to deliver market-leading technology solutions to brokers, an important competitive advantage that helped AFG recruit and retain brokers, increase revenue, and drive their business forward.

Verizon Gets Results

Oracle helped Verizon design a single infrastructure that could be assembled and rearranged, allowing Verizon to bring in any vendor's product and add it to the mix. "That worked well for us, since as long as Oracle adhered to standards and integrated with multiple vendors, we could buy different components from whomever we wanted and it would all fit together," confirmed Ebrahimi.

Applications

More than 70,000 customers, in more than 20 industries around the world, rely on Oracle’s enterprise applications and industry solutions to provide end-to-end business capabilities. Learn more about Oracle Applications and Oracle Industry Solutions.

APPLICATION SOLUTIONS

Business Intelligence

Customer Relationship Management

Enterprise Performance Management

Financial Management

Governance, Risk, and Compliance

Human Capital Management

Procurement

Project Portfolio Management

Supply Chain Management

Transportation Management

Web Commerce

INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS

Aerospace and Defense

Automotive

Chemicals

Communications

Consumer Goods

Education and Research

Engineering and Construction

Financial Services

Healthcare

High Technology

Industrial Manufacturing

Insurance

Life Sciences

Media and Entertainment

Natural Resources

Oil and Gas

Professional Services

Public Sector

Retail

Travel and Transportation

Utilities

Wholesale Distribution

Technology

Oracle Fusion Middleware is the #1 application infrastructure foundation. It lets organizations create and run agile enterprise applications while containing IT costs. Oracle Database, the world’s #1 enterprise database, lets organizations deliver more information, with a higher quality of service, at a much lower cost. Learn more about Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database.

Lojas Renner Gets Results

The evolution of Lojas Renner’s IT system into IT solutions began with Oracle’s complete solution that was specifically designed for the retail industry. However, the decision to move into the cloud and allow Oracle to provide best-in-class applications and expertise on a continuing basis was one of the company’s most important technology advancements. With Oracle’s cloud computing services, Lojas Renner has access to the latest industry and enterprise applications as soon as they become available.

Integration Inside Each Layer

Within each layer of the Oracle technology stack, all components are engineered to work together—either individually or as part of a product family or suite. Oracle tests everything within the layer, including interactions between the applications, middleware, and database.

For example, thousands of developers spent millions of hours developing code, stress testing, cluster testing, and regression testing all the components in Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. This level of investment ensures that all Oracle products—in every product family and every product suite—can interoperate with each another.

Integration Between Layers

Oracle integrates all layers of the technology stack—from the applications down to servers and storage. Every layer is tested and certified to work with every other layer: applications are tested with middleware, middleware is tested with databases, and databases are tested with servers and storage.

Oracle certifies the complete stack, so customers know which versions of software are designed to work together. For example, every major application product line that Oracle delivers—including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, JD Edwards World, Siebel CRM, and Oracle Fusion Applications—is certified with Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Customers running other Oracle Applications can also take advantage of Oracle’s common set of technologies (such as business intelligence, security and identity management, and the latest user experience tools) through Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Oracle packages these technologies into standardized solutions that customers can deploy and upgrade together. Because Oracle owns the entire technology stack, and because Oracle engineering teams work together closely, Oracle can optimize the entire stack’s best-of-breed components for performance, reliability, and security, and can share these technology advances throughout the stack.

Integration With Other Systems

Although you get the greatest benefit from running a technology stack that uses Oracle products for all the layers, most Oracle customers have heterogeneous environments that include legacy and third party products.

No problem.

Each layer in the Oracle stack—and each product within each layer—is engineered according to open industry standards, so customers can integrate Oracle technology into their existing IT landscape and still realize significant benefits from using Oracle products anywhere in their technology stack.

Turkcell Gets Results

Turkcell launched a comprehensive initiative aimed at simplifying and consolidating its data warehouse infrastructure and meeting rising service-delivery expectations. The company used Oracle Exadata Database Machine to reduce the size of its data warehouse from 250 terabytes to 25 terabytes. Oracle Exadata also helped them reduce the average time needed to produce a report from 27 minutes to 3 minutes.

Merck Gets Results

When conventional methods—such as upgrading CPUs and adding hardware and memory—failed to address performance issues in its electronic laboratory (E-lab) notebook and chemical database, Merck turned to Oracle Exadata for an innovative solution.

"Now, people are able to leverage our chemical repository not just for patent purposes but for research," said Clark Golestani, vice president of IT at Merck Research Laboratories. "They can visualize and mine all the information in it effectively and efficiently." The company attributes the faster search performance to two technology advancements found in Oracle Exadata: Exadata Smart Scan, which filters out data that is not relevant to a query, and Exadata Smart Flash Cache, which improves performance for OLTP applications.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Gets Results

The server farm for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory stores and manages NIF's information and consists of 70 physical servers—a mix of SPARC and x86-based systems running Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic Server, and Oracle VM. The physical servers at NIF now support 700 Oracle VM-based virtual machines that scientists and researchers use to analyze the results of their experiments.

PHH Gets Results

PHH decided to use Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine to standardize its IT infrastructure, free up resources, and help maintain tighter control over unstructured data and storage growth. "Having our databases, infrastructure, and applications in the same place will greatly simplify our data center topology and hardware footprint," explained Chris Brewer, vice president of platform technologies at PHH. "This consolidated Oracle platform will also allow for standards-based implementation and integration between different application tiers."